Five Colleges, Incorporated,
and its member campuses of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke
and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst
have received a four-year, $1.5 million grant from The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation to pursue their Curricular Innovations
project. The four-year grant will fund the project’s two-pronged
approach to improving the student experience by exploring
digital approaches to teaching the humanities and strengthening
connections between the liberal arts and professional education.

“The Curricular Innovations grant will enable the consortium to strengthen relationships
and create new pathways between our liberal arts colleges and the university’s
graduate and professional programs to invigorate the teaching at both the undergraduate
and graduate levels,” said Five Colleges Executive Director Neal Abraham. “Similarly,
strengthening use and access to digital humanities tools and techniques will
support efforts of our humanities colleagues to remain current in their teaching
methods and will prepare students for the more technologically enhanced environment
that will be the future world of work in humanities.”

Bridging Liberal Arts and Professional
Education

Called “Bridging Liberal Arts
and Professional Education,” the first prong of the Mellon-funded project will
look for ways to combine the best qualities of a liberal arts education—the development
of critical thinking, the ability to make connections across disciplines and
to communicate effectively—with preparation for specific professions.

Supported
by the grant, the Five College deans are inviting collaborating
groups of faculty members from the consortium’s liberal arts colleges and university professional
programs to propose two-year projects bridging liberal arts and professional
education. Possible areas of interest include public policy, environmental studies,
business and public health. The types of activities supported by the grant could
include faculty seminars, curriculum development projects, team teaching, residencies
for professional practitioners and activities involving professional school graduate
students in liberal arts courses.

Embedding the Digital in the
Humanities

The second prong of the project, “Embedding the Digital in the Humanities,” will
explore ways to use digital humanities resources and technologies as a tool for
teaching humanities to liberal arts students, supporting student scholarship
and preparing them for the increasingly technological environment of the working
world. In practical terms, “digital humanities” can mean anything from creating
online access to archived paper collections to using technology to inform and
expand teaching of traditional humanities disciplines.

The fact that digital
humanities techniques are already being used by consortium
faculty members indicates the project should find fertile
ground in Five College classrooms: A history professor at
Mount Holyoke used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to
study patterns of community development in late 19th- and
early 20th-century Britain and France. A religion professor
worked with a computer scientist at Smith to develop handwriting
recognition software for author identification of early Syriac
manuscripts. An art historian at Amherst took digital photos
of frescoes and mosaics removed from a house in Pompeii and
reassembled them to make a virtual reconstruction of the
house.

This phase of the project, which
will be directed by a faculty member, will have three phases:
creating the infrastructure for digital humanities to thrive,
integrating digital humanities into the curriculum and developing
resources for its use in the classroom. Strategies for carrying
out these phases will range from providing funding for faculty
training to hosting experts in campus residencies to enrolling
students in a summer program to learn techniques to navigate
and participate in digital humanities.

Work has already begun
on both aspects of the project, with calls for proposals
being distributed and a project team assembled. Grant funding
will continue through the 2014-2015 academic year, at which
time it is expected that many of the strategies developed
by the project will be incorporated into the ongoing best
practices of the campuses.

Based in Amherst, Massachusetts,
Five Colleges, Inc., is a nonprofit educational consortium
created in 1965 to advance the extensive educational and
cultural objectives of its member institutions—Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith
colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.